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Forum:Forms based interface for new page creation
Semantic Mediawiki, Semantic Forms and Semantic Drilldown are three extensions to Mediawiki (the engine underpinning all wikia hosted wikis). Semantic extensions allow the information that is entered on a wiki page to be easily filtered, queried, sorted, browsed, edited, etc. Rather than being stuck with the one Search function and potentially have to scan several articles to view the data you want you'll be able to perform powerful filtering and querying to find the data that best suits your current need. Initial roll out will be for wiki pages belonging to the categories: * Category:Boats * Category:Skins and then soon after for * Category:Tracks and some time down the road for these last two, if there is community interest: # Category:Clubs # Category:Hosts A standard form will be used for initially creating a page as well as for subsequent editing a page. This will ensure that mandatory fields are completed before a page is created and it will ensure that information entered is using consistent format, units, abbreviations, etc. This form-based approach will not apply to the more free-form articles that make up the 100 or so rules and guide articles. Powerful queries (some of which we may have not yet imagined) can be run without fear of careless data input leading to meaningless query/search results. By the way data includes images which are vital for illustrating such "objects" as race tracks, boat models and skins. See a prototype example (for data about each skin) at: smwtest The path is not yet clear to me but I suspect that this approach to tagging data (the terminology used is annotating data values with semantic properties) will mean that data a human would not normally be bothered to contribute will be made easy to contribute. A helper utility written in java, perl, python , C or some such programming language might extract data from Autosave.Gbx or Track_name.Gbx files for subsequent upload in batch mode with only a few mouse clicks. This should open up the possibility for such data as race results and race track data to be uploaded in maybe a few mouse clicks. The possibilities that can easily be imagined include: * Top 10 fastest finish times for each track (separate list for each boat model) * Ability to filter lists like the one above based on prevailing wind strength or maximum wave height and so and so forth * User's ability to vote toward popularity of each track (.. or skin, .. or club ... or host!) Category:Tracks is being planned right now so if you have ideas then please contribute at the Category talk:Tracks discussion page. najevi 13:42, 8 July 2009 (UTC) Importing race data I previously said the path was not clear to me. Today a piece of that path did become clear. So long as the individual race data can be composed into a specific XML file format then batch mode upload to uniquely named wiki pages in a dedicated namespace for race results is possible. ( see and it's companion ) The unique pagename will identify the date-time-stamp of a race start and finish. If need be the host name might be included to remove any chance of ambiguity. This unique naming will then tolerate multiple users deciding to upload data from the same race. Subsequent uploads will overwrite prior uploads but since the race data is identical this will not cause any data loss or corruption. najevi 01:43, 11 July 2009 (UTC)